Sexual Health in the News Week of Feb 28-March 06

Other News This Week

In this piece, NCSH member Amber Madison takes an in-depth look at the policies and practices of leading social media organizations that often limit or censor positive sexual health content. NCSH members, Larry Swiader and Deb Levine, along with NCSH Co-Director, Susan Gilbert, are quoted in this article.

Among teens who said they dated, one in five girls and one in 10 boys said they'd been abused at least once during the past year. Most teens who reported physical or sexual abuse experienced more than one incident of abuse, according to the study.

Today, HIV testing is at an all-time high. Due to testing advances and intensified efforts to reach more people unaware of their infection, 86 percent of people with HIV know they're infected. But there's still work to do -- more than 186,000 individuals with HIV in the United States still don't know they're infected.

Overall, more than half of U.S. pregnancies are unintended, and roughly 1 in 20 American women of reproductive age have an unplanned pregnancy each year. That averages out to a cost of about $366 per every woman of childbearing age in the U.S.

Why doesn't the Common Core have a sex ed component? Given that, on average, sex will matter to one's life about as much as how one uses grammar, one would think we'd have some nationally organized approach to ensure that the basics of sex are covered in public schools.